Abstract
Here we adopt a novel strategy to investigate phonological assembly. Participants performed a visual lexical decision task in English in which the letters in words and letterstrings were delivered either sequentially (promoting phonological assembly) or simultaneously (not promoting phonological assembly). A region of interest analysis confirmed that regions previously associated with phonological assembly, in studies contrasting different word types (e.g. words versus pseudowords), were also identified using our novel task that controls for a number of confounding variables. Specifically, the left pars opercularis, the superior part of the ventral precentral gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus were all recruited more during sequential delivery than simultaneous delivery, even when various psycholinguistic characteristics of the stimuli were controlled. This suggests that sequential delivery of orthographic stimuli is a useful tool to explore how readers, with various levels of proficiency, use sublexical phonological processing during visual word recognition.
Highlights
The process of translating orthography into phonology during reading can occur at multiple levels
We report activation as significant at voxel-level inference of p < .05, family wise error corrected for multiple comparisons across the whole brain (Z > 4.72) or within the pre-defined ROIs
For completeness we report significant effects at an uncorrected threshold of p < .001 if their extent was greater than 10 voxels across the whole brain
Summary
The process of translating orthography into phonology during reading can occur at multiple levels These levels can differ in the size of the orthographic unit (lexical or sublexical) and the contribution of semantics. Words with atypical spellings (e.g. yacht) can only be read correctly via previously learnt lexico-semantic associations. These observations motivated dual-route theories of reading (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977; Marshall & Newcombe, 1973; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1974; Morton, 1980), with the sublexical, grapheme to phoneme route being referred to as the ‘indirect’, ‘graphophonological’ or ‘assembled’ route to visual word recognition and the lexico-semantic. The notion of dissociable routes to phonology is fundamental to connectionist models that differentially weight the possible links between orthographic and phonological units (Meyer et al, 1974; Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)
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